Dear Editor,
With the help of our print media I have been highlighting the need for our Human Resource Management (HRM) practitioners to eschew tendencies to ‘cut and paste’ imitative approaches to learning and development in the workplace. The temptation to initiate training programmes that have been executed elsewhere just to keep up with the Joneses or to project ‘busy-ness’ can indeed boomerang or militate against the effectiveness of valuable needs-based training.
In a recent publication, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development reminds us that the world of work is changing rapidly and therefore our approaches must also evolve. Change, as we all know, is not always comfortable, but it is vital if we are to effectively achieve the best for our organization and its constituent parts including, and especially, the staff.
Therefore, HRM practitioners must initiate and implement programmes that are in tune with the needs of the organization within the context of its current challenges. HRM practitioners must be sensitive to the outcomes and impact of their work and not merely how many training sessions they have run, irrespective of their pragmatic value. Such realization must also accommodate different approaches and techniques of training/learning programmes, including digital and self-learning approaches, as the world moves to a more tech-savvy future. For example: the HRM professional/training practitioner should not shy away from advising employees to look up so and so on the internet, and provide a synopsis of what they have learned from it, as opposed to the usual copying of the said data and presenting it electronically at the training session to show off that he/she has ‘conducted’ a training programme.
Yours faithfully,
Nowrang Persaud
